The Bluestocking 364: Are the Dursleys rich?

his highly monetizable boy-made-good backstory

Happy Friday!

Slide into the weekend with this fun bit of polling . . . which fictional families do people see as rich?

For more fascinating polling on this topic—who counts as rich?—click here. The interplay of inheritance, housing wealth and income is very interesting to me (as someone with a good income who nonetheless lives in a shoebox, cos London).

We will generously forgive the author’s mis-spelling of Bennet, even though we privately wonder if the shades of Pemberley are to be thus polluted, because of this intriguing footnote: “The Bennetts are part of the gentry . . . No-one in the family works, except for administering their estate, and they have an income of £2,000 a year, roughly 180 times that of an average labourer. . . the Bennets have an equivalent income of £4 million a year, and Darcy £20 million a year — yes, Darcy is richer, but both are very rich.”

Helen

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The Tyranny of TikTokkers Who Turn Up (Economist, £)

Low take-up is the secret sauce of many British benefits. It means the British state can, at times, be generous. Under the Motability scheme, disabled people can swap a mobility allowance worth about £75 a week for a car. Thanks to various government subsidies and guarantees—since the government pays Motability directly, its cost of borrowing is low while it is vat-exempt—it is a bargain. A BMW i4 costs about £650 a month from a normal leasing company; it is half that on Motability. About 815,000 people use Motability. Another 1.6m people are entitled to it. Some prefer the cash. Plenty of others simply do not yet know what good value the scheme is. Thanks to TikTok, Reddit and X, they soon will.

What happens when everyone tries to claim what they are owed? Special-needs provision is an unhappy example. Education, Health and Care plans allow parents to claim benefits worth tens of thousands if their child has learning difficulties. The number of children on plans has risen from under 240,000 in 2014 to nearly 600,000 in 2024. Partly, this is due to an increase in cases. Often, it is awareness. People have realised help is on offer. They are guided on their way by a slew of advice, from Reddit to Mumsnet, an influential messageboard, to TikTok. The result? About 20 councils are at risk of bankruptcy solely from special-needs provision.

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Duncan Robinson has written a smart piece about how the state has long relied on people have no real idea what they are technically “entitled to”, using pension credit, asylum and mobility allowances as an example.

Part of the issue also seems to be that, as cost of living pressures increase, the gulf between “gets state aid” and “doesn’t get state aid” has grown, which makes claiming much more vital to maintaining a decent standard of existence. (See also: the gap between social housing costs and even the cheapest private rental.)

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Bluestocking recommends: Manhunt (Royal Court). When Rob first told me he was writing a play about Raoul Moat I thought, “how’s that going to work, then?” The answer was: by focusing on the period of time between Moat’s release from prison and his eventual death on a Northumberland moor, interspersed with flashbacks to his encounters with police and social services, and (movingly) his childhood. The result is an unsettling play that asks the audience to consider if Moat was simply a “monster”, as David Cameron said at the time, or whether anyone or anything could have stopped him from going on that shotgun rampage.

But don’t just take the recommendation from me, a woman—a man of my acquaintance (OK, it was Page 94 regular Matt Muir) said that this play completely undid him, although he later added that he had “a heavy weekend” before seeing it. (Add “art is better consumed hungover” to last week’s suggestion that “art is better consumed jetlagged”.)

PS. My usual tip for the Royal Court is row K of the stalls, which has a gangway in front of it so you get mega legroom. However, in this production, that means you miss the top of the stage, where some text is projected.

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Quick Links

1. “We must be clear-eyed about the conditions that have enabled his discourse on inequality to get a hearing in the legacy media. Part of it is his knack for putting himself — his highly monetizable boy-made-good backstory — at the center of his message. Part of it is his narrow emphasis on wealth taxes, presented without a broader program or strategy. This makes the demand easier to neutralize — reframed not as a challenge to power but simply a “good idea.” Oliver Eagleton reviews Gary Stevenson’s Trading Game (Jacobin). Just putting it out there, I’m getting big whiffs of Eau De Steven Bartlett from ole Gazza.

2. Here’s the recorded version of my discussion with David Runciman of Network, and how it foretold Kanye and Tucker (Past Present Future).

3. I didn’t want to like Last One Laughing (Amazon) on principle, but even Joe Lycett’s presence wasn’t enough to ruin it. Simple premise: put a load of comics in a room together for six hours, and tell them not to laugh. When Danny Dyer turned up in episode four, I was gone.

4. “Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.” Gen X entered the workforce just as creative jobs stopped being well-paid and fun (NYT, gift link).

5. “From January 1969 until April 1970, there were 4,330 bombings in the U.S., or about nine a day. But by the 1980s and ’90s—after getting through Watergate, stagflation, and the Carter-era “malaise” of the ’70s—we had recovered.” A wild stat from David Brook here (The Atlantic).

6. I went on The Bulwark’s podcast with Mona Charen to talk about Andrew Tate’s MAGA backing, Nigel Farage’s populism problem, and the evidence base (or not) for puberty blockers.

7. “Here’s a fact: to date, one single animal, from one species has been brought back from extinction. It was the Pyrenean Ibex, the last of which, Celia, died in 2000. Cells were taken from her before she died, and then in 2003, using the same technique by which Dolly was cloned, a baby ibex was brought to term from a surrogate goat. This meant that the genome of the kid was near identical to that of the parent, and therefore unquestionably a member of the same species. The kid died soon after birth suffocating with ill-formed lungs, but it did live for a few minutes, making it the only species in the 4 billion year history of life on Earth to have gone extinct twice.” Adam Rutherford is funny on the alleged “de-extinction” of the dire wolf (Substack).

8. “We are likely imminently to witness the greatest migration in scientific talent the world has ever seen, probably larger than that from 1930s Germany.” Hadn’t thought of this, but it’s true. You can argue that the Nazis lost the war because they drove away so many great scientists—mostly obviously, John von Neumann, who moved from Hungary to Los Alamos. Now that process might happen in reverse, with great scientists fleeing America for Europe. As John Kingman argues here, we really ought to have Yvette Cooper “standing at Heathrow offering out a welcome mat and generous visas”. (Comment is Freed, £)

That’s all for now! Here comes the obligatory book bit:

Book tour: My second AND FINAL book, The Genius Myth, is published in June. Hear me talk about it with Armando Iannucci in London on June 19—use the code GENIUS25 for a 25 percent discount on tickets.

Pre-order the book here (UK) and here (US). Tickets are also available for events this summer with Sarah Ditum in Bath; Professor Judith Buchanan in Oxford, and Henry Oliver at Dr Johnson’s House.